Jennifer’s Nest

By Jennifer Ken and I are both constitutional over-planners. We tend to produce detailed, elegant and highly optimistic plans partly out of sheer high spirits. This makes us mildly smug at times: you won’t catch us making dozens of trips…

Part 1 of Our Bathroom Light-Hunting Safari By Jennifer Ken and I realized yesterday that for weeks we’ve been in the grip of what a friend of mine from graduate school calls the Serengeti Effect. The Serengeti Effect originally described…

By Jennifer To hear recent transplants talk, the only true safety in Tucson lies in retreat along the freeway to Vail or Marana, and the neighborhood where I grew up is a meth-crazed wasteland. For me, part of nesting has…

By Jennifer Here’s an odd contradiction about the 21st century: online pharmacies beg to sell me drugs I am anatomically unqualified to use, clothiers dog me from website to website, promising me a discount on a shirt I flirted with…

By Jennifer [This post is part of Our Kitchen Molding Makeover series.] I’m not much a shopper, and I find shopping online downright agonizing. That said, it is strangely gratifying to browse the antique and furniture sections of our local…

By Jennifer I firmly believe that good taste is not innate; it is cultivated through education and opportunity. Admittedly, this belief is self-serving, since as a child I papered the walls of my bedroom with calendar art featuring unicorns, and…

By Jennifer We stopped by to see my folks yesterday — Ken needed to borrow my dad’s circular saw — and while the guys went out to the garage to inspect the race car, mom talked animatedly about her latest…

By Jennifer If you’ve been following the story so far, you know that Ken urges people to make relatively inexpensive changes that have a huge impact. Moldings and painting are his prime examples of this principle. But some of the…